The UpStream

It is always a little bitter-sweet to write one of these articles. As a person who owns 3 webOS devices, including a launch Palm Pre, plus a PLuGHiTz Live! app, the future of the OS is very interesting to me. Since HP first purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, the road has been rocky for webOS, with several rumors that HP might retire the platform. When the hardware division was closed and the fire sale started, it looked like the end. Then, HP fired their CEO and things looked brighter. Now, that CEO has a decision to make, and she says she will make it soon.

In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman has said that the decision will be made within 2 weeks as to what the future of Palm/HP's highly reviewed and poorly sold platform, and the devices that will or will not run it. The decision is a difficult one; she has to weigh the initial cost of $1.2 billion against the sales of devices and, of course, the possibly value of selling the platform. There have been plenty of rumors of interest from outside, including Facebook and Amazon, both of whom want hardware but don't want to offer Android on said devices. We know that HP will release Windows 8 tablets after that platform goes live, but HP wouldn't be the first company to offer multiple platforms. Samsung currently offers phones with Android, Windows Phone 7 and their own proprietary OS.

So, the constant stream of rumors and conjecture are almost at an end. No matter which way it goes, I think everyone will be happy to be able to stop talking about it.

It is the end of a gaming era. GamePro magazine, which went into publication in 1989, will officially shut down its website at noon on Monday, December 5. One final physical magazine will be published and released after the closing of the website.

GamePro started publishing the physical magazine in 1989 and went digital in 1996. Like all niche physical publications, GamePro has struggled to maintain relevance and readership in an increasingly digital world. A few concept changes over the years, including writers going from handles to real names and the most recent, going from monthly publication to quarterly in July of this year.

While the site and magazine may be going away, GamePro is not entirely dead. Hit the break to find out where GamePro is headed next.

It's like we're living the dot-com bust over again and the addage that history repeats itself really is true. Months before some analysts started to doubt the Groupon IPO, we predicted its demise right on our show. As it would turn out, we were right. Groupon's IPO for $10 billion, initially, worked like a champ, however investors have dumped almost all of their stock just as fast as they bought it up. Shares fell from just over $31 to half of that at $16 at the time of this writing. The stock has even seen a low of just under $15, bringing the company's valuation to under $10 billion and leaving no hope for them in the future, or any other Internet company for that matter. Investors are now afraid of the Internet yet again and the financial industry is in shock as if they have no clue why this didn't work. At least Groupon is one of the few companies with a business model.

With all of that being said, now would be a bad time for another company to try and start an IPO, right? Zynga would be wise to stay out of that mix for the time being, so it only makes sense that Facebook thinks now's the perfect time to shoot for a $100 billion valuation and $10 billion in an IPO, and that's not a typo.

Well, Microsoft got there first. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That is the mentality of Microsoft as, after rumors of them possibly purchasing Yahoo from under Google's nose, have come to fruition. The company has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Yahoo. Along with Microsoft are other investors like Silver Lake and TPG Capital who all believe that the success of Yahoo lies within a new, better management team.

Microsoft is looking to tap into Yahoo's 81.2 million unique news readers and by signing the NDA, they will be able to dive into Yahoo's financials a little more. However, all of these investors are not interested in a full buyout. Instead, bidders are looking to buy a minority stake in the company. Microsoft's goal is to help finance a bid and not buy them outright, according to sources closer to the matter.

Clearwire has been in a little bit of financial trouble as of late. Aside from Sprint deciding that they would be moving to LTE in the future of their 4G deployment, leaving Clear behind after 2012. This week, we're adding more fuel to the fire, as Clearwire is thinking about not paying a huge debt that is due in about two weeks.

In September, the company had $698 million in cash and short-term investments, so it should be able to afford to pay the $237 million it owes on December 1st. The problem is that the company has to raise a lot more money in order to stay in business in a year's time.

It's time to show love to the WinPho 7. The Windows Phone app marketplace is now loaded with more than 40,000 different apps. The All About Windows Phone website uses a tracking system that can identify trends and project figures. The system currently shows that about 165 apps are added to the Marketplace each day, would should give us more than 50,000 apps in January.

In the past three months, we've seen 11,000 apps added to the store and around 5,000 of them were submitted in the past 30 days. For the Marketplace in general, the numbers show that the WinPho platform is really starting to gain attention off the heels of their giant Windows Phone event. 10,000 of the recently added applications are from new and different publishers.